The Vietnam War

A history of the Vietnam War, interweaving U.S. political and cultural history with the military history of the war.

When Senator Edward Kennedy declared, "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam," everyone understood. The Vietnam War has become the touchstone for U.S. military misadventures—a war lost on the home front although never truly lost on the battlefront. During the pivotal decade of 1962 to 1972, U.S. involvement rose from a few hundred advisers to a fighting force of more than one million. This same period saw the greatest schism in American society since the Civil War, a generational divide pitting mothers and fathers against sons and daughters who protested the country's ever-growing military involvement in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, well-intentioned decisions in Washington became operational orders with tragic outcomes in the rice paddies, jungles, and villages of Southeast Asia.

The Vietnam War: A Graphic History depicts the course of the war from its initial expansion in the early 1960s through the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, and what transpired at home, from the antiwar movement and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to the Watergate break-in and the resignation of a president.

"A painstaking and even-handed tour of the politics and the strategic mistakes, the battles and the protests, the lives lost and the lessons learned.”—The Arizona Republic